• poweruser@lemmy.sdf.org
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    1 year ago

    I did back in college. Mobile computing was just becoming a thing but I was way too hipster (and poor) for a PDA or one of those newfangled “smart phone” devices.

    I hacked together a wifi SMS texting gadget following a tutorial on Hack a Day. It ran Debian with Linux kernel 2.6 and was so fun to tinker with.

    It had 32 MB of RAM but X used 11 MB of that so you couldn’t really do anything in graphical mode anyway. A shell running GNU screen however only took 4 MB so it was much more usable from the terminal.

    I eventually figured out a way to pipe images and even (non accelerated, since it didn’t have a GPU) video from mplayer to write directly into the framebuffer. It was a real bear to get it translated into landscape mode.

    I Am Legend in 144p never looked so good.

    Even with the terrible specs, I have never loved a phone so much as I loved that little computer